


just pretending that we're cool

by magneticwave



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-20
Updated: 2013-02-20
Packaged: 2017-11-29 22:18:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/692112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magneticwave/pseuds/magneticwave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In retrospect, using sex to trick Derek out of stalking Scott had maybe not been the greatest idea ever? Whatever, Stiles’ plans always manage to work themselves out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	just pretending that we're cool

**Author's Note:**

> Here, have some emotional repression with a side of failwolf, because clearly this fandom needed _yet another_ TA / student ill-advised sexual liaisons AU.

Okay, so, in Stiles’ defense, he hadn’t badgered Derek about the extra lab time in order to get laid. Stiles is, of course, wily like a fox and capable of such outlandish scheming, but he’d taken a long hard look at how much the midterm electron-pushing diagrams had fucked up his cakewalk of an A and gone to run Derek to ground in his lab on the fourteenth floor of the chemistry building.

“Go away,” Derek had said when he’d seen Stiles, which is definitely something graduate students are not allowed to tell the students they’re teaching.

“Fuck you,” Stiles had said reflexively. In retrospect this maybe explains why getting Derek to agree to let him redo the quantitative analysis lab was so fucking difficult.

Of course, Stiles had prevailed—Stiles _always_ prevails; he’s charming-ish and when that fails, he’s just stubborn and annoying—and two days later Derek is chugging from a cardboard cup of coffee at seven in the morning, blearily watching Stiles stumble around setting up a series of filters and steam baths.

“I think you’re making this more complicated than it needs to be,” Derek says. It’s the last helpful thing he says all morning, and it’s not even that helpful in the first place because he doesn’t follow it up with anything like, oh, how the hell Stiles is supposed to make his experimental apparatus _less_ complicated.

“You’re the worst TA ever,” Stiles tells him, trying to attach rubber tubing to an evaporation flask and not break anything in the process. “You hate people and you hate teaching.”

Once upon a time, Stiles had been a freshman and easily impressed by graduate students, but that had been before he’d fucked three of them—both of his Changing Families in Modern Lit TAs, because English lit grad students appreciated Stiles’ jelly and his ability to deep throat a bottle of gin, and Veronica, a third-year in his lab who was covered in watercolor tattoos and for some reason suffered a stroke and decided to deign to sleep with Stiles the night after she’d passed her comps—and it’d been way, _way_ before he’d met Derek Hale, who is officially the worst grad student on the face on the planet.

“Whatever,” Derek mumbles into his coffee. He probably thinks that’s a witty retort somewhere deep inside his head, but it isn’t.

Stiles says, “God, go get me some magnesium chloride from the stock room,” and Derek deliberately takes his time draining his coffee before stalking out of the lab to hopefully get Stiles a drying agent and not to hide at his desk on the fourteenth floor again.

The morning basically continues on in that theme—Stiles needs something Derek’s forgotten to prep for him, Derek makes a loud, frustrated huffing noise and goes off to find Stiles whatever he needs, and Stiles breaks two beakers and a watch glass—until it’s just cleared noon and Stiles’ stomach is making sad, beleaguered grumbling noises.

“Did you eat breakfast?” Derek asks suddenly from where he’s hovering behind Stiles’ left shoulder. He’s like a fucking cat; Stiles’ hand jerks and he almost spills 10 M HCl down the front of his Captain America t-shirt.

“ _Oh my god_ ,” Stiles shouts, “what’s _wrong_ with you? I could’ve died or been heavily disfigured by that!”

“Tragic,” Derek says drily. “Your hands are shaking. Did you have breakfast?”

“Whatever,” Stiles mutters, concentrating on measuring out hydrochloric acid without splattering himself in the face. It’s difficult because Derek’s right—alert the presses, probably the first time that’s happened in an age—Stiles hasn’t eaten in twelve hours and his blood sugar is severely unhappy at him.

“Don’t be a child,” Derek huffs, like he has any room to talk at all. “Go eat something, your solution has to boil for 45 minutes.”

“Jesus Christ, I’m not an infant, let me just measure this fucking acid,” Stiles snipes.

As Stiles finishes and puts down the beaker, Derek says, “That’s debatable,” and he’s still there, right behind Stiles, as Stiles pulls down the front of the fume hood and peels off his nitrile gloves. They’re gross and sweaty and his fingers feel like dead fish.

“Yeah, because clearly I’m the one who failed kindergarten for being shit at interpersonal behavior,” Stiles tells him, balling up the gloves and shooting them across the room to the wastebasket. “Three points, the crowd goes wild.” He throws his arms in the air so that Derek will have to step back to avoid being elbowed in the face.

God forbid Derek Hale acts reasonably in any given situation, though, because instead of moving away from Stiles he moves inward, crowding up in Stiles’ space inside the reach of his elbows and really it’s his own damn fault that Stiles bring his arms down and they brush along the side of Derek’s shoulders, the outside curve of his arms.

“Christ, you’re a mess,” Derek says, and then one of them must go for the other because Stiles’ lower back is suddenly getting acquainted with one of the scarred wooden tables in the center of the lab space, Derek Hale’s teeth sunk into his bottom lip. It’s not like Stiles is totally blameless here; he’s palming Derek’s ass through jeans that are tight and barely appropriate lab attire and when he feels the table bump up against his ass, it makes total sense just to climb on top of it.

Stiles’ backpack and zippered container of pens and highlighters go clattering to the floor, closely followed by his notebook, illicit water bottle, and his cell phone. He hears them fall and probably break and he’d be more worried about that if Derek Hale weren’t climbing up onto the table with him, his knees digging into the flesh of Stiles’ inner thighs as he redistributes his weight above Stiles’ body.

The jeans are too tight to get off completely, so Stiles tabs open the button of Derek’s fly and sucks Derek’s tongue into his mouth as he pulls down the zipper, using the leeway to slip his other hand into the back of Derek’s jeans, getting a handful of that ass without any fabric interfering.

It’s really only a matter of seconds from there before Stiles is tugging on Derek’s dick, his left knee hitched somewhere up Derek’s hip, riding against the thigh that’s pressing his groin into the table. If Derek’s doing something with his hands, it’s not touching Stiles’ dick, but Stiles still can barely think beyond the sharp taste of Derek’s mouth and the heat of his chest against Stiles’ through their shirts. If Stiles shifts, he can feel the pebbles of Derek’s nipples against his and that’s nice so he does it again and again and again until the kissing just turns into wet, open-mouthed licks as Derek groans into his mouth.

When Stiles comes, he tightens his fingers and thumbs the slit of Derek’s cock without conscious intention, since he’s mostly busy trying to grind all of his brain cells out through his dick. Derek doesn’t seem particularly bothered by that, though, since he’s coming too, spilling across Stiles’ hand and the front of his shirt and jeans.

“Fuck,” Stiles says, into Derek’s mouth because they’re still pressed together, panting almost in unison. “Fucking _fuck_.”

He’d known Derek was attractive, because Stiles has _eyes_ , but if Stiles has learned anything from the last three and a half years of his college career, it’s that, a lot of the time, attractive people are fucking awful at sex because they don’t exactly have the incentive to get better. Stiles hadn’t wanted to fuck Derek, even though his ass was a fucking world-class work of art, because Stiles had known better than to think it would be satisfying.

Stiles was wrong.

“Okay, yeah, we’re doing that again somewhere that isn’t a lab table,” he tells Derek. “God, you weigh like a million pounds, get off of me.”

Derek rolls to the left and almost falls off of the table; he recovers at the last second, with reflexes Stiles would envy if he weren’t basically catatonic.

“This is gross,” Stiles mumbles, pulling at the fabric of his t-shirt where it’s wetly clinging to his stomach. “Oh, awesome, it’s _squelching_.” Everything is squelching, since he came inside his jeans, and now he’s going to be sticky and disgusting as he walks back to his apartment. “Do you think I can justify using the emergency shower?”

“No,” Derek says. He’s on his back to Stiles’ left, one of his hands on his stomach, the other resting between them. He doesn’t look angry and in fact looks kind of awkward without his default expression; he’s staring at the ceiling like one of the fluorescent lights is going to tell him how to navigate this situation. “If you flood this floor, Harris will kill you.”

“And you,” Stiles reminds him. “It might almost be worth it for that.”

“I will rip your throat out,” Derek says. He says it mildly, almost contemplatively, and he still hasn’t moved.

Stiles can’t help it. “Kinky,” he says, and when Derek rolls his head down to look at him, Stiles smirks. “You didn’t even have the courtesy to unzip me, dude, you owe me naked sex in a real bed.”

“You’re twelve,” Derek says disbelievingly. “Why the hell would I have sex with a person who has to specify what type of bed it is?”

“Oh, fuck you,” Stiles says. “I’m a great lay.”

“You’re like a dog,” Derek says, thoroughly enjoying the words if he’s to be judged by the smile along the corners of his mouth. “Do you overproduce spit?”

“You wish,” Stiles leers, which is naturally when the evaporating flask explodes inside the fume hood, sending boiling stones in all directions to rattle against the delicate glassware still trapped in the fume hood and completely destroying any possibility of Stiles getting laid again this afternoon.

~

Smooth is not really an adjective anyone ever uses to describe Stiles, but he’d like to think that he manages it on Tuesday, when he crawls out of bed to make his 8 am O Chem 2 lab. Derek is wearing his judgmental hipster glasses and two henleys today, like he felt the need to arm up before facing Stiles. It’s cute, in a way that’s not cute at all because Stiles just wants to fuck his brains out. Feelings are for people like Scott, who got engaged at twenty and spends every night on Skype having nauseatingly cute _I miss you more_ / _No I miss you more_ giggle-fests with his fiancée. Stiles wants someone to shoot him like a dog before he becomes that person.

“Morning,” Stiles says cheerfully, purposely going around to the front of the classroom before slipping into his usual desk on the far side from the door. He doesn’t do something juvenile like brush against Derek—it’d be hard, Derek’s using the podium like a phalanx, so Stiles would have to kind of throw himself across it in order to make physical contact—but he smiles and tries to remind Derek with his eyes that great sex could be a thing they’d be having if Derek wasn’t such a gigantic wuss.

“You failed,” Derek replies, and he actually throws Stiles’ last lab report in his face. Despite the fact that there’s about six feet of space between them, Derek manages to hit Stiles in the neck, probably because the lab report is twenty-three pages long and weighs more than Stiles’ cat.

When he examines the neat writing on the back page, Stiles finds out that he has not, in fact, failed—a 75 is pretty distinctly not failing, especially in light of the considerable curve this class is going to face by the end of the semester—but Derek’s taken advantage of his egregious lie and is now standing in the opposite corner of the room, by the door, handing lab reports to people as they walk in. Most of the students look confused, since this is the closest Derek has come to solicitous all semester.

Eventually, Derek is going to have to return to the front of the classroom, and about forty minutes after that, he’s going to have to join Stiles and the rest of his lab section in the room where Stiles had so generously—and _awesomely_ —jerked him off last weekend. Time is on Stiles’ side with this, so Stiles can afford to lean back and tap his pencil nonchalantly against his desk.

Unfortunately, suavity is less on Stiles’ side; thirty seconds into the guitar solo of “Sweet Child O’Mine,” he hits the edge of the desk too hard and sends his pencil skittering towards the front of the classroom. It’s all very _Saved By the Bell_ , including the part right afterwards when Derek materializes from nowhere just in time to scoop up Stiles’ pencil and jab it point-down into the top of Stiles’ desk.

“I would recommend some therapy for those anger issues,” Stiles says, and he promptly begins to hum “Sexual Healing.” Derek stares at him, unblinking, for twelve bars, and then he turns on his heel and goes to pick up a piece of chalk and begin his lecture on Grignard reagents. Stiles would maybe feel a little bit self-conscious about how much Derek clearly wants him to die a horrifying death, but there’s a cute little pink flush at the base of Derek’s neck, turning red and biteable near his ears, and Stiles can read that shit like Malinowski.

~

Come Friday, Stiles’ phone is still dropping calls like Skrillex and Operation: Fuck Derek Hale is proceeding about as well as to be expected—which is to say not at all—when Scott comes back from a late shift and opens with, “Derek’s stalking me again.”

“I thought we cured him of doing that,” Stiles says. He’s theoretically studying for his Anthro of Food midterm, but he’s taking a study break to tickle Lydia’s stomach. Whether she hates him or barely tolerates his presence changes from day to day, and today she likes him enough to let him pet her, which is such a novelty that Stiles is taking advantage of it to the detriment of his studying.

“Yeah,” Scott says, somewhat glumly, “so did I. But he was like, lying in wait outside of the clinic when I got out of surgery. Dude, he brought me _coffee_.”

“He wants your science dick,” Stiles reminds him, in case Scott took advantage of the recent lull in Derek’s lurking to erase his own memory. “He wants all up on it.”

“Oh god, shut _up_ ,” groans Scott. He doesn’t have anything on hand to serve as a projectile, so he picks up his keys from where he’s dropped them on the table by the futon and flings them at Stiles. Allison had given him a rubber wolf keychain when he’d gotten into vet school—Stiles had personally thought he’d gotten Scott a way better gift, which was a sheet of construction paper promising Scott two rounds of margaritas on Stiles the next time they went to Si Somos Locos—and it bounces off of Stiles’ shoulder with a squeak when it connects.

“Ow, Jesus,” Stiles mumbles. “Way to repress your shit, bro.”

“I don’t want to think about Derek’s dick, Stiles,” Scott says, exaggeratedly patient, like his mom used to get when he and Stiles had stumbled back to the McCall house after a night of post-lacrosse debauchery in high school. “Besides, I bcc’d him on the email I sent to Tufts when I accepted their offer. He _knows_ I’m going to vet school.”

Lydia takes offense at the splitting of Stiles’ attention between her and Scott; she sniffs and wriggles to her feet before disappearing in the direction of Scott’s bedroom, where she will presumably take great joy in shedding all over his leather jacket. “In his heart of hearts,” Stiles says, “Derek will always want to be science bros with you, Scott. He wants you to join his lab and accompany him on his great quest to solve Tröger’s base or whatever.”

“That’s like not even at all what Derek’s doing his PhD on,” Scott says. He takes a breath before he smirks. “No wonder you’re failing O Chem 2 lab.”

Stiles hefts Scott’s keys and lobs them at Scott’s head, where they make a satisfying series of clinks at they connect. “Ow, you fucker!” Scott shouts, and he takes a header over the back of the futon to tackle Stiles. They manfully wrestle for a few minutes before it becomes obvious that Scott is too tired from his shift to seal the deal and Stiles is more interested in keeping Scott from rolling onto his Anthro of Food notes than he is in winning.

“I don’t know what to do,” Scott admits, flopping over Stiles’ stomach and propping his chin on his hand. “He’s not, like, being illegal-levels of creepy or whatever. He just won’t leave me freaking alone. I feel bad about how sad he always looks.”

“Oomph,” Stiles says, since Scott’s elbow is digging into his diaphragm.

Obligingly, Scott moves so his elbow is on Stiles’ small intestine instead of some other organ he might need for breathing. “Telling him he’s being creepy doesn’t work.”

“You clearly aren’t trying hard enough,” Stiles says. “Get off me, I have a plan for this.”

Scott groans as he climbs off of Stiles. “Your plans are the worst. Dude, you are _so bad_ at plans.” He keeps talking even though he’s walking to his room and is obviously not going to stick around hear how awesome and not at all terrible Stiles’ plan is. “Do you remember when you told me that it was a good idea to hitchhike to Blacksburg to see Allison? And then you gave me a bottle of vodka and said it would dull any of the agonies of travelling?”

Still sprawled on the living room floor, Stiles grins. That hadn’t been a terrible plan, that’d been fantastic. “That was a great trip,” he shouts after Scott, although not too loudly because the walls in their apartment building are fairly thin and the Chinese couple that lives next door are always willing to bang on their shared wall to remind Scott and Stiles of that fact. “You got to Blacksburg in time for Allison’s show, didn’t you? I call that Mission Accomplished.”

Voice muffled, Scott yells back, “I got there in time for her show with a _broken arm_ , Stiles.”

“That’s why I got you the bottle of Vladi,” Stiles says, with all the satisfaction of a man who knows that the bounds of his own awesomeness are unlimited. “Anyway, I promise that this plan includes neither hitchhiking nor vodka, which I know are your two least favorite things now.”

Based on the stories Scott had shared when he’d gotten back—which Stiles had heavily edited in his own head, because Allison was like his sister and there’s some shit you never want to know about your sister—Allison had been _incredibly_ happy that Scott had crossed the country for her first show and she’d been perfectly willing to nurse Scott and his broken arm back to health; Stiles doesn’t understand why Scott still gets twitchy when someone casually mentions hitchhiking, but to each his own.

“I fucking hope not,” Scott says, coming back into the living room. He’s wearing sweats instead of his scrub-like uniform from the clinic and he picks up an Xbox controller as he stumbles to the futon. “Assassin’s Creed before bed?”

“Nah, I need to finish reviewing for my Anthro of Food midterm.” Stiles automatically goes to check the time on his phone, but the touchscreen is still on the fritz and the top half of the screen is pixelated and basically impossible to read. “Fuck, do you know what time it is?”

“You need to get a new phone,” Scott, Captain Obvious, says. “It’s 1:25.”

Stiles groans and briefly buries his head in a pile of PowerPoint printouts before shaking himself and pulling his shit back together. Of all the classes he’s taking this semester, Anthro of Food is probably the most interesting as well as the least amount of work outside of class, but the midterm looks like it’s going to be a fucking nightmare to make up for all those other times Stiles could just skim the readings and still make cognizant points during class discussions.

When Stiles had imagined his senior year, back when he was a sophomore who’d just declared his Anthropology major and five minors—in Stiles’ defense, Classics, Sociology, Chemistry, Gender Studies, and Spanish had all seemed very interesting and it wasn’t like he had time to major in all of them—he’d painted it as a kind of magical land of constant inebriation and fun. Being home on a Friday night, studying for a midterm, with Scott playing Assassin’s Creed 3 and digging his toes into Stiles’ side, doesn’t exactly fall within the spectrum of ‘inebriated’ or ‘fun.’

Stiles writes TO DO on top of the closest piece of paper, which is notes from last Thursday’s lecture on wedding banquets, and directly underneath it HAVE MORE SEX WITH DEREK HALE. Just to be an asshole, he adds, IN A REAL BED.

“What’s your plan?” Scott asks three hours later, after he’s drunk two bottles of Blue Moon and clearly mellowed the fuck out. “For Derek,” he clarifies when Stiles blinks up at him, his pen still making a flow chart of the evolution of food production in post-colonialism North America.

Nonchalantly, Stiles brushes an elbow across his to-do list and pulls it out of Scott’s line of vision. “Nah, bro, it’s cool,” he says. “It probably wouldn’t work anyway. That’s one repressed motherfucker.”

“Yeah,” Scott says. He’s Stiles’ best friend, so if he weren’t basically comatose thanks to his ten-hour shift and the two beers, he’d realize that he knows that Stiles never gives up on a plan without having tried at least one or two iterations of it first. But Scott is coming off of a bender of a shift and his beer tolerance has always been shitty, so all he does is grunt, murmur, “’Kay,” and fall asleep on the futon, curled over the novelty pillow shaped like a penis that Stiles had received from the ladies at Friends for his twenty-first birthday.

Stiles would maybe feel bad about lying to his best friend, except this is the best plan ever and it’s totally going to work and at the end of it he’s going to have fucked out his hatred of O Chem and Derek will hopefully be too exhausted to follow Scott around making sad, angry faces, so it’s going to be therapeutic for everyone involved.

No one’s awake to judge him, so Stiles does a brief fist-pump and then he goes back to his flow chart.

~

The chemistry building isn’t exactly burdened with extra storage closets—there’s a reason Stiles is taking O Chem 2 lab his senior year, and that reason is the fucking long as hell waiting list he’d had to get on his sophomore year to even get a spot thanks to the chemistry building’s severe space constraints—so when Stiles goes to kidnap Derek from his lab Monday afternoon for what he hopes he’ll be able to turn into a quickie, he doesn’t actually know where they’re going to end up.

“What _now_?” Derek asks when he sees Stiles from his little cubicle. He’s cowering behind three gigantic binders and a box of half-finished electrodes like he thinks Stiles is going to eat him or something.

“I don’t bite on the second date,” Stiles assures him, which is a blatant lie. “Come on, I want some hot chocolate.”

“What the hell does that have to do with me,” Derek wants to know, but he stands up and takes off his glasses anyway.

Stiles rolls his eyes and grabs the closest belt loop of Derek’s stupid jeans. “What do you think it does, genius?” When he tugs, Derek resists for three seconds—obvious posturing, based on the way his chin goes up, too, like Stiles doesn’t clear him by two inches—before following, hips-first, Stiles out of his lab.

Even though Stiles has seduction on his mind to the detriment of everything else, he keeps his eyes peeled for Harris as they step out into the hallway. It’s noon, the only free hour between morning and afternoon labs, and all of the other grad students on the floor were smart enough to clear the hell out of Dodge for their only sixty minutes of freedom all day.

“Are you a masochist?” Stiles asks. He forgets to leer, but that’s okay because Derek takes it as sexual innuendo anyway, his ears turning red under the floppy fringe of his hair. “I didn’t mean it that way, but hel _lo_.”

“Shut up,” Derek mutters through his teeth. “The electrodes aren’t exactly going to make themselves, especially not since our undergrad has been permanently poached.” He glares at Stiles like it’s somehow his fault that his roommate gave up working in Derek’s lab to get more experience for the job he plans on doing for the rest of his life.

“You seriously need to let that go,” Stiles informs him. He reaches the end of the hallway and makes the executive decision to turn left. All of the floors in this building are organized to the same basic floor plan, and hopefully the space that’s the storeroom on the fifth floor will be, like, a janitor’s closet or something on this one.

“Training him took forever,” Derek continues to grouse. “He was doing really well, it doesn’t make sense to give that up just to go pet puppies for twenty hours a week.” He’s speaking under his breath in a surly huff, which is basically whining in Derek-speak, and Stiles has to pretend to cough so that he doesn’t laugh and totally kill any chance of his getting laid in the next twenty minutes.

Stiles is still pulling Derek by his belt loop; he lets go at the next corner and pushes Derek around it, using the chance to dig his thumbs into the twin dimples at the base of Derek’s spine that he doesn’t have to see to know that they exist. “I know you don’t share well with others, but Scott’s wanted to be a vet since he was five and if the pre-vet requisites here didn’t kill him, you’re not going to be able to seduce him to a life of grad school by buying him lattes every day.” They reach their destination, which is a unisex handicapped bathroom.

The gods of sex are smiling down on Stiles. “Here,” he says, and he twists the handle on the door and pulls Derek inside as quickly as he can.

“What the hell, Stiles?” Derek half-shouts as the door clangs shut behind them. The lights aren’t on and Stiles can’t see a damn thing as he thumbs the lock on the door. “Are you fucking insane? What if someone actually handicapped has to use this bathroom?”

“Yeah, in the next thirty minutes that’s going to be a real problem,” Stiles huffs. “Shut up, where are you?” He reaches out to where Derek had been when the door had shut on them, but his chest is a lot closer than it had been before and Stiles’ palms land solidly against Derek’s pecs. He doesn’t need light to feel the warmth of Derek’s body crowding against his, pushing him against the cool painted metal of the door.

“You are a fucking menace,” Derek says. His voice has gone quiet, like people’s do when it’s dark and they feel the need to whisper. Stiles doesn’t believe in wasting time, even though his father would claim that he loves to hear himself talk; he takes two handfuls of the shirt his palms are resting against and tugs Derek forward, off-balance, so they both slam into the door.

If Stiles had maybe put more thought into arranging this tête-a-tête, he’d have tried for somewhere with, like, a table or a couch or something, but the student lounge in the chemistry building is colloquially known as the Fishbowl and has all glass walls, so that had seemed like a bad idea.

Still, desperation is the mother of invention or whatever, so Stiles takes advantage of the fact that Derek, chest pinned to his, is right where he wants him and runs his hands up the firm line of Derek’s chest to his neck and from his neck to his jaw, where Stiles can take a firm hold of him and get a start on this sex train.

Considering that he’d had to be physically led here like a recalcitrant dog, Derek goes from disinterested to heavily involved in about three seconds. When Stiles’ fingers grip the rough skin of his chin, he reacts by palming the side of Stiles’ neck and just fucking going to town, his tongue inside Stiles’ mouth and his fingers slipping inside the waistband of Stiles’ jeans, which are a normal person’s jeans and not inhumanly tight.

“Jesus, Stiles,” he rasps against Stiles’ mouth. “What the hell.” His fingers fucking _burn_ against the thin skin where Stiles’ torso meets his legs; Stiles can feel the heat of his palm against his dick, even through two layers of denim and cotton.

“Fuck you,” Stiles says, not really sure what he’s saying, “why the hell are you talking, jackass?”

Derek laughs; it’s wet, because now he’s sucking the meat of Stiles’ neck into his mouth and biting down, rubbing the skin with his tongue like he’s licking a lollipop. Stiles’ coordination in the light isn’t that great, so adding sexual stimulation in pitch black isn’t helping matters. Derek seems disinterested in Stiles’ assistance, though; one second they’re upright and clothed, propped against the door, and the next Stiles’ jeans and boxers are somewhere in the vicinity of his calves and Derek’s hair is brushing against Stiles’ stomach, his hands bracketing Stiles’ hips and pinning them to the door.

Thanks to the darkness, Stiles can hear Derek’s tongue when he licks his lips, the slithering sound of his knees as they rub against the linoleum floor, and then, delightfully, the groan from the back of Derek’s throat as he starts to suck.

Stiles doesn’t get a promise out of Derek that he’ll stop stalking Scott, which means this mission wasn’t totally successful, but he gets an orgasm out of the deal, as well as getting to hear the incredibly satisfying sound Derek makes as he comes, his mouth still around Stiles’ dick, like he’s dying and gone to Valhalla. It seems like a fair trade.

Less fortunately, Stiles almost give himself a concussion when he comes, banging his head back against the metal door in a way that makes him feel sudden sympathy for professional athletes, and he knees Derek in the face as a result of that.

“Never fucking again,” Derek growls, when Stiles turns on the light so they can clean themselves up. Derek’s cupping his nose; there’s come splattered against the back of his hand and blood leaking from between his fingers. The blood is kind of gross, but Stiles stares at the streaks of white for a long time, longer than he could casually play off, as he reminds himself that he literally _just_ orgasmed and his refractory period, while great, is not biblical.

Belatedly, Stiles says, “Stop whining,” and he has to repeat that four more times as he has Derek tilt his head back so Stiles can dab at the blood pouring out of his nose. “It’s not broken, you gigantic toddler,” he tells Derek, even though Derek isn’t actually complaining about his potentially broken nose and his developing shiner so much as he’s bitching about Stiles’ lack of coordination.

“Are you convinced that we need to move this to a bedroom yet?” Stiles asks. He’s holding the back of Derek’s head in his left hand and pressing a wad of paper towels to Derek’s nose with his right. Derek’s fingers are locked loosely around Stiles’ right hand, maybe as a warning, but they’re warm and non-threatening.

“What, a real bed?” Derek snipes. “And let you kick me in the kidneys or something? I’ll pass.”

Stiles wants his “Fuck you, dickface” to be cutting, but it comes out sounding affectionate rather than pointed.

~

Three weeks later, Stiles has mostly recovered from his disastrous lab midterm with a series of high Bs on his lab reports; Derek is still showing up outside of Deaton’s vet clinic after Scott’s shifts and the classrooms where Scott UTA’s P Chem, sometimes with, like, a bear claw and a hazelnut latte, sometimes just to ‘chat’; Stiles has fucked Derek in two more bathrooms and on the sour-smelling couch in the deserted anthropology undergrad lounge and still has yet to get Derek to agree to have sex somewhere that isn’t going to give them agonizing back pain in the ten years.

Or to stop stalking Scott, which is obviously the biggest priority.

“Why not?” Stiles asks after their fourth encounter, as he and Derek are recovering the ability to walk. They’re back in the anthropology undergrad lounge because Stiles can shove a desk chair under the doorknob to approximate a lock and at least there’s a horizontal surface for them to lie on. There are at least three broken springs currently digging into Stiles’ butt but the aftershocks are still sending little zigzag spikes of shivers down his thighs and he doesn’t trust himself to move.

Derek makes a grab for his pants where they’re draped over a nearby armchair, but he misses by a good six inches. “Scott’s wasted on vet school.”

“You are literally the _only person on the face of the planet_ who thinks that,” Stiles tells him. If he had the energy, he’d mime strangling Derek, but he doesn’t. “Look, if you want what’s best for Scott, you need to realize that what’s best for Scott is going to vet school, marrying Allison, and having lots of adorable tousle-headed babies. He’d be miserable as fuck in academia.”

Derek recovers enough control over his facial muscles to morph from blissed out to moderately annoyed. “How do you know that?”

“I’ve known Scott since we were five, dude,” Stiles says, patting Derek’s hand sympathetically. “We’re practically psychic for each other. Academia would eat Scott alive and even if he did survive—which he might, Scott can be pretty tough—he’d still be unhappy.”

With a low grumble, Derek shakes off Stiles’ hand. “I don’t know anyone who can think about chemistry like Scott can. _Harris_ can’t, and he’s the department’s prodigy. It’s just—a waste.”

Stiles doesn’t exactly have a bottomless well of sympathy for Derek’s plight, especially since he seems like he’s just being a stubborn asshole who doesn’t know how to admit when he’s wrong, so he pinches Derek’s forearm and says, over Derek’s responding yelp, “It’s not a waste if it makes him happy, douchefuck. I realize you’re unfamiliar with the concept of being happy, but it’s actually pretty simple—”

Derek tries to smother Stiles with one of the gross pillows that probably haven’t been Febreezed in six or seven years, and in retaliation Stiles locks his knees around Derek’s waist and rolls them both to the floor.

Sadly, even though the floor of the anthropology undergrad lounge is just as gross as the couch and Derek’s ass is going to have seriously bad rug-burn for at least a week, Derek responds to Stiles’ suggestion that they move on to an actual bed with clean sheets by tossing Stiles’ jeans at his face and leaving before Stiles has a chance to claw himself free.

~

Stiles is just getting into the groove of his favorite rendition of ‘Derek Hale, why don’t you go die in a fire,’ when Scott digs a pea out of his fried rice and flings it at Stiles. “I know that this is what you always do when you first fall for someone, but can we please skip this step with Derek?”

“Excuse you,” Stiles says. “A, I don’t _always_ do this, and B, I’m not falling for _Derek Hale_.”

Scott rolls his eyes and stabs a fork into his Styrofoam container of pork fried rice. “Those are both really untrue. You can’t lie to me, I’ve known you forever.” He keeps going, even after he stuffs a forkful of rice and vegetables into his mouth, and Stiles has to look somewhere other than Scott’s face because that shit’s disgusting. “And you are totally falling for Derek. He’s all you talk about. I know that you’re sleeping with him. Monica told me to tell you that the anthro student lounge smells like spunk and she’s going to murder you the next time she catches you sneaking someone in there.”

“It does not, I totally Febreezed in there,” Stiles says.

Scott cackles triumphantly and jabs his fork in Stiles’ direction. “See? Totally sleeping with Derek.”

“I’m not sleeping with him,” Stiles hisses. They’re sitting in one of the vinyl booths at Mr. Wong’s Egg Roll Palace and it’s basically deserted because it’s four in the afternoon, but Stiles leans across the table and whispers out of habit. “We’re just having sex, okay? It’s a casual sex thing. It is not a feelings thing.”

“Uh-huh,” Scott says. “Why has he stopped stalking me, then?”

That one trips Stiles up, because he hadn’t been aware that Derek had given up his dream of sharing a lab with Scott and winning the Nobel prize for—whatever it was that Derek wanted to study for the rest of his life in a windowless lab. Synthesizing some compound or something. “He has?” Stiles asks. His voice sounds weird inside his own head, so he fills his mouth up with broccoli to hopefully fix the problem.

“He hasn’t brought me a cup of coffee in a week and a half,” Scott says, sounding triumphant about it.

Stiles had run into Derek outside of the Starbucks by the Student Union on Friday and they’d started off yelling at each other about whether or not Stiles’ proposed synthesis for caproic acid had been reasonable and ended up necking in an alcove by the Rainbow Alliance office on the third floor of the Union. When Derek had, breathless and flushed, pulled off of Stiles’ neck like a fucking vampire, Stiles had taken the opportunity to remind Derek that Scott was going to get a restraining order if Derek didn’t leave him alone. “Shut up,” Derek had breathed, and that had seemed like a well-reasoned argument so Stiles had gone back to sucking Derek’s tongue into his mouth.

“Oh,” Stiles says. He tries to casually prop his chin in his hand and ends up poking one of the bruises that Derek had bitten into the skin of his neck, too high to be hidden even by one of Derek’s hipster scarves.

“Yeah, _oh_ ,” Scott echoes wryly. When Stiles looks at him straight on, Scott is grinning, lopsided, his enthusiasm barely constrained. “You really _liiiike_ him,” Scott sings. “You want to _kiiiiiss_ him.”

“Of course I want to kiss him,” Stiles says. “He’s a really good lay.” That’s a perfectly respectable reason to want to kiss someone, but Stiles doesn’t sound totally convinced by his own argument. “I mean. He’s a dick. Falling for Derek Hale would be like shooting myself in the fucking foot.”

There. That sounds better. To reward himself, Stiles takes a large bite of sesame chicken.

“Oh my god,” Scott says gleefully, “you _really do like him_! Stiles, this is great!”

“No it’s not!” Stiles barks. “I mean, no I don’t. Like him.” He chokes on a stray sesame seed and has to down half his bottle of Mountain Dew to recover, by which point Scott has stopped looking quite so gleeful and started to exude an aura of sympathy and understanding. “Why would I like him?” Stiles asks, basically babbling at this point. “He’s an asshole. Who the hell marks off a lab report for an inaccurate reflux apparatus? So I mixed up the vacuum and the three-way adaptor—it’s not like I did in the experiment itself.”

At this reassurance, Scott stops looking horrified. “I know he’s kind of creepy,” he begins, gingerly, like he has to ease Stiles into this or something.

“Derek is a _lot_ creepy,” Stiles interrupts. “Or have you forgotten how he fucking stalked you with baked goods for a couple months so he could, like, seduce you away from vet school? It was touch-and-go for a while there if this clusterfuck was going to end up like _Misery_ , with you chained to a lab bench and Derek standing over you with a sledgehammer, ready to break both of your feet.”

Scott laughs at this totally realistic projection, pointing his fork at Stiles now in a way that’s more mocking than exclamatory. “If you think that Derek wanted to seduce me, you’re an idiot.”

“Oh, fuck you, I’m totally on top of this shit,” Stiles says, but Scott keeps talking over him.

“Dude, the last time Derek came to my P Chem recitation he just, like, wanted to know whether or not you liked Thai food. He hasn’t tried to talk me into joining Harris’ lab for grad school in like a month.” Stiles isn’t really sure what his face is doing right now, but Scott drops his fork and says, “Whoa, hey, are you okay?” so whatever it is, it isn’t good.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Stiles wheezes.

“Crap,” Scott says. “Um, I guess we can—pretend that I didn’t say that?”

“ _What the hell_ ,” Stiles shouts across the table. “Does—Derek have _feelings_ about me? This wasn’t supposed to be a feelings thing! We hate each other!” Reminding himself that he and Derek can barely stand to be in a room together makes Stiles feel less like he’s drowning under a slow, inexorable tide, so he inhales sharply and says, again, “We hate each other. He thinks I’m a moron and I _know_ he’s an ass.”

“Right,” Scott agrees, clearly lying. “But, um, if you hate him, you can stop sleeping with him. Your mission’s been completed, Derek has given up on me getting a PhD in chemistry.”

“Good,” Stiles says. His face still feels funny. He puts more sesame chicken inside of his mouth in an effort to shock it into working properly, but the chicken’s become cold and rubbery and his tongue is no longer interested in Chinese food. “Great.”

Scott says, “Yeah, great,” in an awkward voice and shovels pork fried rice into his mouth so that when he says, “Dude, Lydia tore a hole in one of my shoes,” it’s accompanied by a spray of half-chewed rice.

“Gross,” Stiles says by rote.

~

The email waiting for Stiles when he wakes up simply reads _Get to my office_. Technically Stiles’ thesis’ final draft was submitted at the end of February, but Finstock looks homicidal when Stiles gets to his office and he has a printed copy of Stiles’ thesis on his desk.

It shouldn’t be totally shocking that Finstock, who is a mess of a person, had taken a month to read Stiles’ thesis and figure out that half of it had deviated from the rough draft Stiles had first shown him in November, but Stiles nevertheless is caught off guard and therefore totally unprepared to be yelled at for twenty minutes about how unacceptable his final draft is.

Stiles is not the kind of person who sits back when he’s being chewed out, so by the end of Finstock’s office hours he’s gone red in the face and all of Finstock’s hair is sticking on end and they’ve compromised that Stiles will rewrite the last section and his conclusions to move back in the direction Finstock had originally approved and Finstock will in turn make an effort not to vomit every time he sees the parts that Stiles had done on his own initiative.

Stiles has made an effort to track Derek down for a quickie every Monday for the past few weeks but he’s not feeling it today, between the fact that Derek might actually be bringing emotions into what should’ve been casual fucking and the sick roiling in his stomach from Finstock’s shouting.

He’s like 78% sure that Scott is totally wrong about the feelings thing, but Stiles doesn’t want to face Derek until he figures out the next phase in his plan. Theoretically his ultimate objective has been achieved, but when Stiles thinks about not seeing Derek anymore, beyond lab for five hours a week on Tuesday morning, the churning in his stomach gets worse. Clearly his dick is unhappy about taking a few steps back, even if that might not be the worst idea in the history of ever.

The twenty minutes that Stiles spends in line at Starbucks worrying about how Derek will react during lab tomorrow morning prove to be wasted ones, though, because when Stiles picks up his grande caramel hot chocolate and fights through the crowd to get back to the front door, Derek is hovering outside like a total freak.

It’s clear he’s been waiting for Stiles because he pushes off of the bench he’d been leaning against and pushes his glasses up his nose, before he seems to remember that he’s farsighted and takes them off, shoving them into the front pocket of his messenger bag.

When did Stiles even learn that Derek is farsighted? _Why is that a thing he knows_?

“Ugh,” Stiles says, mostly in response to himself. “Dude, I just spent like four hours being chewed out by Finstock about my thesis, I’m so not in the mood.”

“That’s a first,” Derek says. “Normally you’re like a fucking rabbit.”

Stiles flips him off, but it’s casual and Derek recognizes that; he grins, folding his arms across his chest. Stiles smiles back at him, soft and automatic, and then the panic sets in heavy in his chest because _why is he smiling at Derek_? Derek doesn’t smile. Derek is a robot who loves chemistry and hates all people and sunshine. “You know you want up on this jelly,” he tells Derek with a leer—Fake It ’til You Make It: the Stiles Stilinski Story—as he adjusts his bag over his shoulder.

“If you want to tell yourself that, sure,” Derek says placidly. He falls into step and then Derek and Stiles are apparently—taking a walk? In the afternoon? Normally Stiles would be trying to maneuver them towards a dark corner where he could burn off some of his excess energy by trying to suck Derek’s brain out through his cock, but Stiles is alternating hot and cold and his brain feels too fuzzy for sex. Is this a thing that they do? Do they take walks together? Stiles can’t actually remember.

Stiles has been quiet for too long to have any hope of making a sassy comeback; when he sneaks a look at Derek as he sips at his hot chocolate, he can see that Derek doesn’t seem worried by that. His hands are in the front pockets of his jeans—how the hell he manages to fit them there is a fucking mystery to Stiles—and he looks like he would actually be whistling or something equally stupid if he wasn’t Derek Hale, prince of darkness.

“Shit,” Stiles breathes. “Shit fuck _fuck_.”

He must sound super panicked, because Derek’s head twists towards him and he asks, “What?” with a lot of honest concern.

Panic contributes heavily to the next words out of Stiles’ mouth, which are, “Are we dating?”

“No,” Derek says. That’s the answer that Stiles wants, so it should make him feel better.

It doesn’t, though, because the way Derek says it makes him turn cold.

“Are you sure?” Stiles asks. “Because, you know, I think it might be debatable at this point.”

“Fucking in the student lounge a few days a week doesn’t make us dating,” Derek elaborates, but he sounds exhausted. The more time that passes the more Stiles’ stomach feels like someone’s lobbed lacrosse ball into it. “I realize you have the maturity of an twelve-year-old, but that’s not how relationships work.”

Since Stiles has never actually been in a relationship, that’s a fairly accurate, if upsetting, assessment. “I know how the fuck relationships work,” he says, stung. “I just meant.” Here Stiles trails off, because he doesn’t know what he actually meant. Coming out and asking _Did you bring feelings into our casual sexual arrangement_ seems awkward, not to mention rude.

Well, fuck it. Stiles never got anywhere in life by pussyfooting around. “Do you have feelings?” he asks Derek. A few lame seconds later, after Derek blinks at him a couple times, he adds, “For me. Do you have feelings for me?”

“No,” Derek barks. His neck it turning red; the mark that Stiles had bitten into it last week, over his pulse point, the one that Stiles had made as he’d tightened his fingers at the base of Derek’s cock and tugged, hard, his palm slick with pre-come and sweat, turns from a splotchy pink to a dark purple at the rush of blood.

“Oh my god,” Stiles says, “you totally do. Scott was _right_ , what the hell. Scott is an _idiot_ , how the hell did he figure that out before me?”

“He didn’t figure out anything,” Derek says. “He figured wrong.” He goes to push his glasses up his nose before he remembers that he isn’t wearing them anymore; it leaves him with his left hand in front of his face, his thumb and forefinger brushing the bridge of his nose.

The tight feeling in Stiles’ stomach has gotten worse; it’s risen into his throat and is choking him, but not in a way that’s totally unpleasant. Stiles looks at Derek Hale try not to look stupid as he waves his hand in front of his face and Stiles want to—Stiles wants to—

“Oh, fuck it,” Stiles says, and he grabs the collar of Derek’s leather jacket with his left hand and flings his cup of hot chocolate into a nearby trashcan with his right. Before Derek has a chance to pretend like he’s going to be able to make a smooth move out of this, either, Stiles threads his fingers through the hair on the back of Derek’s head and leads him into a kiss.

Derek’s hand is kind of awkwardly trapped between their bodies, but after a few startled seconds he seems to figure out that maybe a good place for it is on Stiles’ hip. Stiles’ body is conditioned to think that Derek’s hands on him is going to lead to sex, so in about three seconds this is going to go somewhere that it shouldn’t be going on a sidewalk in the middle of campus on a Monday afternoon.

“Bed,” Stiles rasps, pulling away. “Bed _now_.”

“No,” Derek says, even though his hand spasms against Stiles’ side.

“Look, I will fucking take you out to dinner and buy you all the hipster locally sourced pad thai that you want,” Stiles says, “but if we don’t get to a bed we’re going to fuck in the engineering library and I’m pretty sure one of those librarians will shank us.”

It’s not like Stiles is under the impression that he’s making a convincing argument about the engineering librarians, although they are scary and they really do seem like the types to shank someone for trying to neck in the stacks, so when Derek makes a small, embarrassing noise in the back of his throat, Stiles knows exactly to what he’s responding.

They stare at each other for a long time, Derek going slightly cross-eyed because he’s farsighted and probably can’t see all that much of Stiles’ face right now, before Derek nods jerkily and steps back, his fingers still digging into the flesh of Stiles’ hip. “Okay,” he says, and his voice is low and halfway to wrecked. “Yeah, okay, my apartment’s four blocks from here.”

“Well isn’t that fucking convenient,” Stiles says, and he honestly remembers not a single step of that entire four-block walk. He tunes back in for long enough to make a few pointed, hilarious remarks about the fact that Derek lives with his sister and has to check that she’s not around before he drags Stiles into the apartment, but after that it’s the kind of blur that you see in the movies that Allison and Scott used to make Stiles third-wheel to, in high school. Clothes get flung over pieces of furniture and Stiles keeps having to stop and make sure that Derek’s mouth hasn’t gotten too complacent all on its own.

The fact that they even make it to the bed is a fucking miracle, since there’s this long, torturous interval where Stiles is pretty sure that he’s just going to fuck Derek up against the door and they’re both going to have to deal with that, but they make it and Derek’s bed is boring and neat and covered in a blue and grey quilt that it’s obvious someone, probably a grandmother, made for him.

Derek confirms that with the way that he carefully strips it out of the way before pushing Stiles down onto the mattress, rubbing his thigh against Stiles’ dick in long, dragging strokes and drifting down the line of Stiles’ torso with his teeth. Stiles is a babbler during sex, but he’s too focused on finding out how much of Derek’s ass he can fit in his hands to even breathe properly, let alone manage speaking. It takes him three tries before he has enough air to say, “Come on, _come on_ ,” and roll Derek onto his back so Stiles can pin his shoulders to the bed and do some exploring of his own.

Stiles, the beneficent creature that he is, allows Derek off of the bed long enough to dig lube and a handful of condoms that Stiles recognizes from the free ones handed out at the Rainbow office from Derek’s tasteful mahogany bedside table, and then Stiles goes back to licking Derek’s arms with long stripes and fumbling with the bottle of lube.

The entire experience actually ends somewhat anticlimactically. Not _literally_ , of course; Stiles is fucking great at sex and Derek doesn’t look capable of words so clearly he isn’t about to complain, but Stiles doesn’t get a concussion or break Derek’s nose and nothing explodes in a nearby fume hood.

“I was honestly expecting real bed sex to be a little more exciting,” Stiles admits to Derek, his face buried in the curve of Derek’s neck. “I mean, we kept building it to be this _thing—_ ”

“Stiles, shut the fuck up,” Derek says drowsily. “It’ll be a thing.”

“It better be,” Stiles says. He’s too exhausted to get up a good lecherous tone for the words; between not sleeping the night before, the fight with Finstock, and the feelings sex with Derek, he’s basically catatonic. For a guy who has like 2% body fat, Derek is surprisingly comfortable to lie on. “You owe me Thai.”

“Fuck you, you owe _me_ Thai,” Derek says.

“Whatever, we’ll trade off,” Stiles mumbles, which is about when he falls asleep. The last thing he feels are Derek’s hands, one against his lower back and the other high, between his shoulder blades, the heat of them keeping him from totally freezing his ass off. Stiles thinks, _mission fucking accomplished_ , but hopefully he doesn’t say that out loud; Derek’s not really the type to let him live that kind of shit down.


End file.
